Say Hello to Taiwan

Gordon G. Chang

Security, Asia

Taiwan and its friends are becoming more powerful together.

JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER, the distinguished University of Chicago political scientist, argued in the National Interest two years ago that Taiwan had almost no hope of maintaining de facto independence. China, he made clear, will grow so strong in the coming decades that it will, as a regional hegemon, be able to evict the United States from East Asia, dominate its periphery and, one way or another, absorb the island that lies a mere hundred miles from its shores.

Fortunately for the twenty-four million people living in Taiwan, almost everything Mearsheimer thinks about the island’s future is wrong. Mearsheimer gets one thing right, however: the People’s Republic of China will try to make Taiwan its thirty-fourth province.

Mearsheimer relies on standard realist theory to explain Taiwan’s predicament. “The only way to predict how a rising China is likely to behave toward its neighbors as well as the United States is with a theory of great-power politics,” he writes. Applying this theory, he tells us there are two “logics,” China’s nationalism and the country’s imperative to security. “Both logics,” he continues, “lead to the same endgame: the unification of China and Taiwan.” Mearsheimer believes the United States, working to prevent China from dominating its periphery, will at first try to make Taiwan a part of its “anti-China balancing coalition.” Eventually, however, Washington will decide to let go of Taiwan because the prize is more important to the Chinese than to the Americans. From there, it is all downhill for Taipei.

There is an elegant logic to Mearsheimer’s argument, even if it comes off as deterministic at times, but there are two main reasons why Taiwan will prove to be far more resilient than he thinks. First, China during the coming decades will not resemble the country that inhabits Mearsheimer’s imagination. Second, even if China becomes the dominant regional power, as he believes, its neighbors will block it from taking over East Asia. Mearsheimer, perhaps the leading realist thinker today, isn’t all that realistic about Taiwan’s future.

AT THE core of “Say Goodbye to Taiwan” is the assumption that China will continue its extraordinary rise. But will it? In 2014, when the piece appeared, Mearsheimer’s prediction appeared sound. Today, it does not.